I'm not really seeing how what you are saying is any different then Django, Rails, Flask, or Sinatra for me and many others. I can stand up and prototype really fast in any of those frameworks and not have a mess of php left over at the end. That's kinda what those frameworks are made for. The op couldn't do that because he didn't know what he was doing. Which is fine we all start somewhere but we shouldn't choose worse tools just because we don't want to learn how to use the better tools. Things like Django's admin interface and Rails scaffolding are huge boosts to productivity I can't imagine giving those up out of a lack of knowledge or laziness. I don't mean to say you are a bad developer or lack knowledge but you reasoning is the exactly why these frameworks were created in the first place.